Each week, we’ll highlight the most important Cisco Partner Ecosystem news and stories, as well as point you to important, Cisco-related partner content you may have missed along the way. Here’s what you might have missed this week:

It’s been more than two years since we introduced the Cisco Cloud Partner Program and began putting partners at the center of Cisco’s cloud strategy. Now, we’re going wider and deeper with all of the ways Cisco helps you, our partners, win in the cloud era.

In the last two years, the cloud market has exploded and analyst projections are for continued growth in the future. Using Gartner research, we also understand that by 2015, half of all CIOs expect to operate the majority of their applications and infrastructure via the cloud, and that by 2016, global spending on public cloud services will grow to more than $200 billion.

There’s no question that the advent of cloud has changed the customer sales cycle. IT decision making power is increasingly moving into individual lines of business, whose managers are buying computing as an operating expense from cloud service providers or services resellers. Therefore, Cisco’s cloud strategy is to enable, versus compete with, our partners and customers – a major difference when you consider how other vendors restrict sales of cloud-enabled services to their direct sales teams. As a cloud enabler, Cisco helps customers build, deploy, and consume cloud services and at the same time, we stimulate demand for partners’ Cisco Powered cloud and managed services. Read More »

And make sure you mark your calendar to attend one of these theater presentations to learn more about what Cisco can offer your organization:
• My First Cloud Get Started with Cisco Cloud Management from Cisco Data CenterThis session will discuss how Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud enables IT to move from manual to flexible automated provisioning of physical and virtual resources, while maintaining existing processes and governance, increasing IT efficiency. Monday, August 27 10:30am Cisco booth

Is your organization moving to a cloud model through a well thought out RFP with at least 40 requirements? May I suggest that you rethink this model. The RFP approach with a committee generated wish list may work in some situations, or even be required, but in general the IT shops that really differentiate themselves go Agile for the cloud. What does that mean?

In our business unit we have turned the development of our Cloud Automation platform: Intelligent Automation for Cloud to an Agile development methodology and process. This means when I ask if we will have a certain feature in our 3.1 version, I get an unexpected answer: we won’t know until close to the ship date. Going agile means we work off a backlog of user stories versus a hard and fast set of features that MUST be in the release. We can ship at anytime with the right methodologies in place.

This approach also works for our customers in building their clouds with our software stack. Agile cloud builders have a set of cloud user stories that they are implementing and may release the updated version of the cloud functionality every quarter, or even every 2-3 weeks. When relaying this approach that one of our customers is taking to another customer considering our solution, I could see a twinkle in his eye as he said: I bet that could really help differentiate the value the IT organization provides. He got that right.

We sell to customers who have RFPs and those who look for capabilities, roadmaps, and more importantly an alignment of vision and approach to cloud automation. Many cloud builders look for vendors who will grow with their agile cloud and one that has an open and extensible model to build new use cases with. Why is that of paramount importance? If you think you know what your cloud needs six months from now, good luck. If you bet on the fact that your business and technology requirements will change before you get to your next release of your cloud you will need an agile cloud builder methodology.

While 2012 will be the Year of the Dragon, according to the Chinese zodiac, in IT 2012 will be the year of the cloud. And not just one big cloud, but many clouds.

This world of many clouds means numerous opportunities for Cisco partners to offer customers, whether it’s building clouds, selling cloud services, or designing and implementing cloud-ready networks.

To help ensure partners have a successful Year of the Cloud, today Cisco is announcing a set of cloud capabilities called CloudVerse to help partners build public, private, and hybrid clouds for customers — bringing together the intelligence of the network, the power of the data center, and the flexibility of cloud applications.

Here’s just one example of a unique offering: Cisco partner Logicalis built a customized hosted cloud solution for its clients. Watch this video to find out how they did it. Keep reading to learn about new CloudVerse services and technologies.

There’s no arguing that cloud usage is on the rise. By the year 2015, 50% of all CIOs expect to operate the majority of their applications and infrastructures via the cloud. And global cloud traffic will increase 12 times to 1.6 zettabytes per year – that is the equivalent of more than four days of business class video for every person on the planet.

Despite this meteoric increase in cloud usage, it’s still common for customers to tiptoe into the realm of cloud or shun it altogether, citinglack of cloud talent, concerns around overall user experience, security risks, and cost as major inhibitors to cloud deployment. That’s where Cisco and our partners come together to provide deep expertise in strategy, planning, design, implementation, and optimization.

What are the specific new technologies and services in CloudVerse? Read More »

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